The End of Free
Hundreds of websites that used to give their content away for free are now charging for their services. This weblog chronicles the changes. —The End of Free
See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Hundreds of websites that used to give their content away for free are now charging for their services. This weblog chronicles the changes. —The End of Free
is an open-source encyclopedia. If it doesn’t have an entry for something, you can write it yourself! —Wikipedia
Children born to high-tech nerds appear more likely to show signs of a behavioral disorder similar to autism. Silicon Valley cases are booming. —The Geek Syndrome (Wired)
“Much web design has suffered from an over reliance on graphic design principles. Too many graphic designers have tried to force the Web to be what it is not…” —Information Architecture vs. Graphic Design (New Thinking)
(book review) : “…the activity stilled, the cars, houses and workplaces buried beneath layers of volcanic ash, the artefacts of a single moment preserved. What could we learn…?” —Imagine Silicon Valley Buried Like Pompeii
Uh… no. That already is college.com. —“This will be college.com. Contact us.”
“The World Trade Center attack inspired a lot of Web-publishing of independent, personal accounts.” What can weblogs and online diaries teach us about online journalism? —What does Sept 11 teach us about online journalism? (TheMorningNews.org)
“Why bother to code a clever and long-lived virus when a stupid one that spreads for an hour or two gets just as much attention from antiviral experts and the media?” (Uh-oh! An anti-virus company’s marketing flack warns that Goner is coming back! Better pay big bucks to the anti-virus companies, to protect you from clicking…
Wil Wheaton, the actor whose Star Trek character inspired the newsgroup alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die, has long been geekdom’s favorite whipping boy. “But now, thanks to a self-coded, shamelessly dorky website, many of the same folks who loathed Wheaton on the show are finding out he’s a whole lot like them in real life.” —Wheaton’s Trek to Respectability…
A flashback to the Silicon Valley excesses of 1998, before the bubble burst: “There are headhunters who handle only Cobol programmers from Singapore, and headhunters who specialize in luring toy-company executives, and, I’ve recently learned, a headhunting firm that helps other headhunting firms hunt for headhunters.” Po Bronson —Is the Revolution Over?Wired)
“In a study of readers who read either a simulated literary hypertext or the same text in linear form, we found a range of significant differences: these suggest that hypertext discourages the absorbed and reflective mode that characterizes literary reading.” (Miall and Dobson) —Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature (Journal of Digital Information)
“Under the guise of protecting private property, a series of new laws and regulations are dismantling the very architecture that made the Internet a framework for global innovation.” Lawrence Lessig —The Internet Under Siege (Foreign Policy Magazine)
“[L]anguage is often under-estimated, under-valued, and under-funded. How many times have we seen companies import bland, cheap information instead of hiring talented, knowledgeable writers to write fresh, original, interesting content?” Julia Hayden —Language: The Ultimate User InterfaceA List Apart)
Ever been frustrated by a “404: File Not Found” message? Did you ever stop to wonder how the web server feels? —File Not Found!
Which is real and which is fake? The website behind curtain number one? Or the website behind curtain number two? Read about The Yes Men, who use a fake World Trade Organization website to trick the organizers of an international conference. (See: “Evaluating Online Sources.“)Parody? Activism? Lies?
: I have no idea how useful this article really is — it’s a classic case of “I found it on the Internet.” (A few posters have evaluated this article on MetaFilter.) —“Real” Deal about Nuclear, Bio, and Chem Attacks
“MS Word has no right to be a standard for document preparation, since it’s clearly less efficient (for most purposes) than readily available alternatives,” fumes Allin Cottrell. —Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient If the alternative involves typing commands like “c:\gs\gsview\epstool -b -c -o%1.tmp.eps %1.eps”, is it easier to sell your soul to Microsoft? (See: “Using…
E-mail messages, voice-mail recordings and other electronic traces of people were routinely preserved by computer networks or telephone companies… These e-relics often captured a moment in time that is both beautiful and chilling to the people who discovered them. Ariana Eunjung Cha —Salvaging Electronic Last Words (WashPost)
“Traditionally, each company has had to design and implement all of the services it wanted to offer its website users. This approach leads to incredible waste, unprofitable websites, and lowered usability…” [Jakob Nielsen is talking about e-commerce, not personal home pages.] —The End of Homemade Websites (UseIT.com)
Metadata “collects critical information such as heading, summary, author name, date of publication, classification, keywords, etc…. Without metadata a document is left floating in a cyberspace filled with 550 billion other documents. The chances of it being found by the right person at the right time are greatly diminished.” Gerry McGovern —Why Metadata is Important